Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Thank you very much. —Eds.

Surveillance and Scandal

Weapons in an Emerging Array for U.S. Global Power

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009), winner of the Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. An earlier version of this article appeared on TomDispatch.com on January 19, 2014.

During six riveting months in 2013–2014, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) poured out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, revealing nothing less than the architecture of the U.S. global surveillance apparatus. Despite heavy media coverage and commentary, no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such an alluring development for Washington’s power elite. The answer is remarkably simple: for an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a seductive bargain when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line. Even when revelations about spying on close allies roiled diplomatic relations with them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington leader was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leader worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower.1 What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.

Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information for leverage—akin to blackmail—in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfils an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.

The Cost of Cost-Savings

At the turn of the twentieth century, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during the First World War or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only one hundred-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.2

This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.3 Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries during the Cold War, but now on a truly global scale.

In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA’s surveillance told Washington to just “go for it.” This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century—before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor by placing Washington’s leaders beneath an incessant media gaze.4

As the gap has grown between Washington’s global reach and its shrinking mailed fist, as it struggles to maintain 40 percent of world armaments (as of 2012) with only 23 percent of global gross output, the United States will need to find new ways to exercise its power much more economically.5 When the Cold War started, a heavy-metal U.S. military—with 500 foreign bases worldwide circa 1950—was sustainable because the country controlled some 50 percent of the global gross product.6

But as America’s share of world output falls—to an estimated 17 percent by 2016—and its social-welfare costs climb relentlessly from 4 percent of gross domestic product in 2010 to a projected 18 percent by 2050, cost-cutting becomes imperative if Washington is to survive as anything like the planet’s “sole superpower.”7 Compared to the $3 trillion cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NSA’s 2012 budget of just $11 billion for worldwide surveillance and cyberwarfare looks like cost saving the Pentagon can ill-afford to forego.8

Yet this seeming “bargain” comes at what turns out to be an almost incalculable cost. The sheer scale of such surveillance leaves it open to countless points of penetration, whether by a handful of anti-war activists breaking into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, back in 1971 or Edward Snowden downloading NSA documents at a Hawaiian outpost in 2012.9 Once these secret programs are exposed, it turns out nobody really likes being under surveillance. Proud national leaders refuse to tolerate foreign powers observing them like rats in a maze. Ordinary citizens recoil at the idea of Big Brother watching their private lives like so many microbes on a slide.10

Cycles of Surveillance

Over the past century, the tension between state expansion and citizen-driven contraction has pushed U.S. surveillance through a recurring cycle. First comes the rapid development of stunning counterintelligence techniques under the pressures of fighting foreign wars; next, the unchecked, usually illegal, application of those surveillance technologies back home behind a veil of secrecy; and finally, belated, grudging reforms as press and public discover the outrageous excesses of the FBI, the CIA, or now, the NSA. In this hundred-year span—as modern communications advanced from the mail to the telephone to the Internet—state surveillance has leapt forward in technology’s ten-league boots, while civil liberties have crawled along behind at the snail’s pace of law and legislation.

The first and, until recently, most spectacular round of surveillance came during the First World War and its aftermath. Fearing subversion by German-Americans after the declaration of war on Germany in 1917, the FBI and Military Intelligence swelled from bureaucratic nonentities into all-powerful agencies charged with extirpating any flicker of disloyalty anywhere in America, whether by word or deed. Since only 9 percent of the country’s population then had telephones, monitoring the loyalties of some 10 million German-Americans proved incredibly labor-intensive, requiring legions of postal workers to physically examine some 30 million first-class letters and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes to perform shoe-leather snooping on immigrants, unions, and socialists of every sort. During the 1920s, Republican conservatives, appalled by this threat to privacy, slowly began to curtail Washington’s security apparatus. This change culminated in Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s abolition, in 1929, of the government’s cryptography unit—the “black chamber” famous for cracking delegates’ codes at the Washington Naval Conference—with his memorable admonition, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”11

In the next round of mass surveillance during the Second World War, the FBI discovered that the wiretapping of telephones produced an unanticipated by-product with extraordinary potential for garnering political power: scandal. To block enemy espionage, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the FBI control over all U.S. counterintelligence and, in May 1940, authorized its director, J. Edgar Hoover, to engage in wiretapping.

What made Hoover a Washington powerhouse was the telephone. With 20 percent of the country and the entire political elite by now owning phones, FBI wiretaps at local switchboards could readily monitor conversations by both suspected subversives and the president’s domestic enemies, particularly leaders of the isolationist movement such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and Senator Burton Wheeler.

Even with these centralized communications, however, the Bureau still needed massive manpower for its wartime counterintelligence. Its staff soared from just 650 in 1924 to 13,000 by 1943. Upon taking office on Roosevelt’s death in early 1945, Harry Truman soon learned the extraordinary extent of FBI surveillance. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman wrote in his diary that May. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail.”12

After a quarter of a century of warrantless wiretaps, Hoover built up a veritable archive of sexual preferences among America’s powerful and used it to shape the direction of U.S. politics. He distributed a dossier on Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s alleged homosexuality to assure his defeat in the 1952 presidential elections, circulated audio tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philandering, and monitored President Kennedy’s affair with mafia mistress Judith Exner.13 And these are just a small sampling of Hoover’s uses of scandal to keep the Washington power elite under his influence.

“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” recalled William Sullivan, the FBI’s chief of domestic intelligence during the 1960s, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter…’ From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.” After his death, an official tally found Hoover had 883 such files on senators and 722 more on congressmen.14

Armed with such sensitive information, Hoover gained the unchecked power to dictate the country’s direction and launch programs of his choosing, including the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that illegally harassed the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements with black propaganda, break-ins, and agent provocateur-style violence.15 At the end of the Vietnam War, Senator Frank Church headed a committee that investigated these excesses. “The intent of COINTELPRO,” recalled one aide to the Church investigation, “was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”16 These findings prompted the formation, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, of “FISA courts” to approve in advance requests for future national security wiretaps.17

Surveillance in the Age of the Internet

Looking for new weapons to fight terrorism after 9/11, Washington turned to electronic surveillance, which has since become integral to its strategy for exercising global power. In October 2001, not satisfied with the sweeping and extraordinary powers of the newly passed PATRIOT Act, President Bush ordered the NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation’s telephone companies without requisite FISA warrants.18 Somewhat later, the agency began sweeping the Internet for emails, financial data, and voice messaging on the tenuous theory that such “metadata” was “not constitutionally protected.”19 In effect, by penetrating the Internet for text and the parallel Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for voice, the NSA had gained access to much of the world’s telecommunications. By the end of Bush’s term in 2008, Congress had enacted laws that not only retroactively legalized these illegal programs, but also prepared the way for NSA surveillance to grow unchecked.20

Rather than restrain the agency, President Obama oversaw the expansion of its operations in ways remarkable for both the sheer scale of the billions of messages collected globally and for the selective monitoring of world leaders.

What made the NSA so powerful was, of course, the Internet—that global grid of fiber optic cables that now connects 40 percent of all humanity.21 By the time Obama took office, the agency had finally harnessed the power of modern telecommunications for near-perfect surveillance. It was capable of both blanketing the globe and targeting specific individuals. For this secret mission, it had assembled the requisite technological tool-kit—specifically, cable access points to collect data, computer codes to break encryption, data farms to store its massive digital harvest, and supercomputers for nanosecond processing of what it was engorging itself on.22

By 2012, the centralization via digitization of all voice, video, textual, and financial communications into a worldwide network of fiber optic cables allowed the NSA to monitor the globe by penetrating just 190 data hubs—an extraordinary economy of force for both political surveillance and cyberwarfare.23 With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far.

After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet.24

A Dream as Old as Ancient Rome

In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much like Hoover’s FBI once did. In September 2013, the New York Times reported that the NSA has, since 2010, applied sophisticated software to create “social network diagrams…unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible…and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office [or] late-night messages to an extramarital partner.”25

Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. “In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” reads a 2007 NSA document. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”26

Imperial proconsuls, from ancient Rome to modern America, have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies by collecting knowledge—routine, intimate, or scandalous—about foreign leaders. The importance, and challenge, for hegemons to control obstreperous local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the U.S. colonial regime subdued the contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal.27 And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and ‘60s.

Indeed, the mighty British Empire, like all empires, was a global tapestry woven out of political ties to local leaders or “subordinate elites”—from Malay sultans and Indian maharajas to Gulf sheiks and West African tribal chiefs. As historian Ronald Robinson once observed, the British Empire spread around the globe for two centuries through the collaboration of these local leaders and then unraveled, in just two decades, when that collaboration turned to “non-cooperation.”28 After rapid decolonization during the 1960s transformed half-a-dozen European empires into one hundred new nations, their national leaders soon found themselves the subordinate elites of a spreading American global imperium. Washington suddenly needed the sort of private information that could keep such figures in line.

Surveillance of foreign leaders provides world powers—Britain then, America now—with critical information for the exercise of global hegemony. Such spying gave special penetrating power to the imperial gaze, to that sense of superiority necessary for dominion over others. It also provided operational information on dissidents who might need to be countered with covert action or military force; political and economic intelligence so useful for getting the jump on allies in negotiations; and, perhaps most important of all, scurrilous information about the derelictions of leaders useful in coercing their compliance.

In late 2013, the New York Times reported that, when it came to spying on global elites, there were “more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years,” reaching down to mid-level political actors in the international arena.29 Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents indicate that the NSA has monitored leaders in some thirty-five nations worldwide—including Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, Mexican presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Count in as well, among so many other operations, the monitoring of “French diplomatic interests” during the June 2010 UN vote on Iran sanctions and “widespread surveillance” of world leaders during the G-20 summit meeting at Ottawa in June 2010.30 Apparently, only members of the historic “Five Eyes” signals-intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) remain exempt—at least theoretically—from NSA surveillance.31

Such secret intelligence about allies can obviously give Washington a significant diplomatic advantage. During UN wrangling over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002–2003, for example, the NSA intercepted Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s conversations and monitored the “Middle Six”—third world nations on the Security Council—offering what were, in essence, well-timed bribes to win votes.32 The NSA’s deputy chief for regional targets sent a memo to the agency’s Five Eyes allies asking “for insights as to how membership is reacting to on-going debate regarding Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions” and “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals.”33

In 2010, Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asked the NSA for assistance in monitoring the Security Council debate over sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. Through NSA monitoring of the missions of four permanent and four transient members—Bosnia, Gabon, Nigeria, and Uganda—the NSA, said Rice, “gave us an upper hand in negotiations…and provided information about various countries’ red lines,” winning approval of the U.S. position by twelve of the fifteen delegations. Apart from such special assignments, the NSA has routinely penetrated, according to Snowden’s documents, the missions or embassies of at least seventeen nations.34

Indicating Washington’s need for incriminating information in bilateral negotiations, the State Department pressed its Bahrain embassy in 2009 for details, damaging in an Islamic society, on the crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”35

Indeed, in October 2012 an NSA official identified as “DIRNSA,” or Director General Keith Alexander, proposed the following for countering Muslim radicals: “[Their] vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority.” The agency suggested such vulnerabilities could include “viewing sexually explicit material online” or “using a portion of the donations they are receiving…to defray personal expenses.” The NSA document identified one potential target as a “respected academic” whose “vulnerabilities” are “online promiscuity.”36

Just as the Internet has centralized communications, so it has moved most commercial sex into cyberspace. With an estimated 25 million salacious sites worldwide and a combined 10.6 billion page views per month in 2013 at the five top sex sites, online pornography has become a global business; by 2006, in fact, it generated $97 billion in revenue.37 With countless Internet viewers visiting porn sites and almost nobody admitting it, the NSA has easy access to the embarrassing habits of targets worldwide, whether Muslim militants or European leaders. According to James Bamford, author of several authoritative books on the agency, “The NSA’s operation is eerily similar to the FBI’s operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to ‘neutralize’ their targets.”38

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer has warned that a president might “ask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist, or human rights activist. The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be naïve to think it couldn’t use its power that way in the future.”39 Even President Obama’s recently convened executive review of the NSA admitted: “in light of the lessons of our own history…at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking.”40

Indeed, whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of actually conducting such surveillance. In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian people, he wrote, “They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.”41 If Snowden is right, then one key goal of NSA surveillance of world leaders is not U.S. national security, but political blackmail—as it has been since 1898.

Such digital surveillance has tremendous potential for scandal, as anyone who remembers New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s forced resignation in 2008 after routine phone taps revealed his use of escort services; or, to take another obvious example, the ouster of France’s budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac in 2013 following wire taps that exposed his secret Swiss bank account.42 As always, the source of political scandal remains sex or money, both of which the NSA can track with remarkable ease.

Given the acute sensitivity of executive communications, world leaders have reacted sharply to reports of NSA surveillance—with Chancellor Merkel demanding Five-Eyes-exempt status for Germany, the European Parliament voting to curtail sharing of bank data with Washington, and Brazil’s President Rousseff canceling a U.S. state visit and contracting a $560 million satellite communications system to free her country from the U.S.-controlled version of the Internet.43

The Future of U.S. Global Power

By starting a swelling river of NSA documents flowing into public view, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of the changing architecture of U.S. global power. At the broadest level, Obama’s digital “pivot” complements his overall defense strategy, announced in 2012, of reducing conventional forces while expanding into the new, cost-effective domains of space and cyberspace.44

While cutting back modestly on costly armaments and the size of the military, President Obama has invested billions in the building of a new architecture for global information control. If we add the $791 billion expended to build the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy to the $500 billion spent on an increasingly paramilitarized version of global intelligence in the dozen years since 9/11, then Washington has made a $1.2 trillion investment in a new apparatus for world power.45

Just as the Philippine Insurrection of 1898 and the Vietnam War sparked rapid advances in the U.S. capacity to control subject populations, so the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have, since 2001, served as the catalyst for fusing aerospace, cyberspace, and biometrics into a robotic information regime of extraordinary power. After a decade of ground warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration announced, in 2012, a leaner defense strategy with a 14 percent cut in infantry compensated by an increased emphasis on space and cyberspace, particularly investments to “enhance the resiliency and effectiveness of critical space-based capabilities.” While this policy paper emphasized defense against the ability of state and non-state actors “to conduct cyber espionage and, potentially, cyber attacks on the United States” and the defense of “an increasingly congested and contested space environment,” the administration’s determination to dominate these critical areas is clear.46 By 2020, this new defense architecture should be able to integrate space, cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for seamless information and lethal action.

So formidable is this security bureaucracy that Obama’s recent executive review recommended regularization, not reform, of current NSA practices, allowing the agency to continue collecting American phone calls and monitoring foreign leaders into the foreseeable future.47 Cyberspace offers Washington an austerity-linked arena for the exercise of global power, albeit at the cost of trust by its closest allies—a contradiction that will bedevil America’s global leadership for years to come.

To update Henry Stimson: in the age of the Internet, gentlemen don’t just read each other’s mail, they watch each other’s porn. Even if we think we have nothing to hide, all of us, whether world leaders or ordinary citizens, have good reason to be concerned.

↩Ronald Robinson, “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration,” in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds.,Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 132–33, 138–39.